Thursday, 17 March 2016

It's time for the Leave side to wake up and get angry

Looking at the main Leave efforts I couldn't be less enthused. There is no intellectual leadership of any kind. Their approach is to merely tick off all the boxes in terms of the kind of furniture a campaign has - billboards, market stalls, gobshite spokesmen, events and political stunts - but no real ideas and absolutely no clue what they are doing or even why.

The presentation of the Leave campaign is geared mostly to de-Ukipping the campaign - which they think is enough - but if you examine the rhetoric and the details, there is not a fag papers difference between them.

The Leave campaign must work to a few basic objectives. It must establish itself as a credible source of information. It fails. It must be able to show that Brexit is not a leap into the dark and that it is safe. It fails. It must also show that it is actually worth all the major upheaval and that the status quo is sufficiently intolerable. In that, it absolutely fails.

By any measure it is totally inept - and they think that having a bombastic idiot waffling about straight bananas and a legion of people whingeing about the EU constitutes a campaign - despite such a policy manifestly failing to produce any serious electoral successes for Ukip.

I actually very seriously doubt if any of these people have given any thought at all as to what they want for Britain. The only thing they can agree on is that they hate the EU - which isn't a good enough message to go to the country with.

The longer they leave the field open to speculation about what we want and how we are going to get it, the more the opposition can justifiably say that Leave does not know what out looks like and what we will have to do to make it happen. This is entirely an unforced error and if we end up staying in the EU it is nobody's fault but our own.

We cannot complain about media bias. That is not to say that the media is not biased but a good commander accepts the facts on the battlefield as they are and plans in accordance with reality. No excuses are acceptable. We even allowed the campaign to be hijacked by Boris Johnson and cheered when it happened.

We can complain that Flexcit was ignored by the media. But then media follows power and we plebs outside the London bubble have no power and the only prestige we have is among our readers who respect our efforts and the way we do things. We may hate that dynamic but it is the reality - part of the reality we are trying to change by leaving the EU. What we needed is for the lead campaign to put the plan front and centre and effectively defend it instead of leaving the field wide open to speculation.

Mainly the reason that isn't going to happen is largely because the Leave campaign is a state funded operation and largely an establishment effort. You cannot seriously expect the establishment to set about overthrowing itself.

This is ultimately what pisses me off about this whole show. Leaving the EU is not just a matter of adjusting a treaty we don't like. It's about totally transforming Europe, ending the politics of the status quo are starting in a new direction with new people and new systems of governance. A country that has to manage its own affairs will necessarily have to change its systems and consult the people in the changes it will need to make. We are demanding that we have something we have never really had. Democracy.

I am just old enough to remember the mid eighties where you could go and ask a minister to change something or secure an opt out to prevent a damaging law. But that is no longer the case. Our own ministers are now utterly powerless. But even that which we had was not real democracy. It was a marginally more consultative dictatorship and the power still resided almost entirely with the state.

If we are not even awake enough to recognise the magnitude of what we are asking the people to vote for, and have not even the courtesy to run our own campaign independent of state funding - and actually present a plan to show people that they can have the change they all want without paying too high a price, then we really do deserve to be utterly trounced.

This is really what The Leave Alliance is about. We had intended to put in a bid for the lead designation but we've never had a realistic chance of raising sufficient funds to do anything like that - especially not with the field obscured by egotists like Arron Banks using the campaign as an expression for his mid-life crisis. And though we have been touched by the generosity of our donors, we are still way off the mark in raising what we need to put Flexcit in the public eye and we are not going to get any help from anywhere.

And this brings us back to that matter of being polite and minding our manners. Go and watch some footage of politics from the fifties and sixties and you will see the visceral hatred on display over what was being done in our name. Yes there was shouting, yes there was bad language and our MPs were not the lilly livered sycophants we have now.

Any MP serious about leaving the EU should be battering Cameron for his grotesque deception and anybody wanting to leave should be absolutely totally focussed on demonstrating that the Prime Minister has lied through his teeth - and yes - it very much matters.

Have we seriously become so totally bovine that we are willing to let a prime minister lie to the house of commons and let him walk away unscathed? Jesus wept! Why are they not destroying this insincere, lying toad just on principle? When did we roll over and decide these two dimensional men of plastic were acceptable leaders?

This is why personally think we are staying in the EU. Our side doesn't know what it wants, has no real idea of what is even realistic - and even among the eurosceptics who are supposed to be specialists in this area, are not even past first base in understanding the issues.

It's going to take a bigger miracle than The Leave Alliance can pull off even we do raise enough funds to properly advertise Flexcit. Our supposed allies have done everything they can to frustrate that plan.

Frankly, there is not enough anger in this campaign. There is plenty of unfocused hatred of the EU but really the anger should be directed at our MPs - they who did this to us in the first place - and those Tory wastrels who will not lift a finger to help us win even though they say they want to leave.

I say these people do not deserve our support and we should not even tolerate them. It is not good enough to say you want to leave. Winning depends on destroying Cameron - and unless MPs are willing to put their money where their mouth is then they are wasting our time.

If they were serious they would be quitting the party en masse. Instead of hounding these bastards we've rolled out the red carpet for Boris Johnson. What the actual fuck?

That they are not attacking Cameron tells us they are not serious and they do not regard this of all issues as sufficiently important to make a moral and principled stand. And frankly, if they are not prepared to do their jobs as defenders of British sovereignty, then really what is the point in any of this? Why even bother voting for a referendum in the first place?